I am writing in response to Thomas Dentons Feb. 2 letter, Politically incorrect crowd doesnt grasp the new rules. Mr. Denton suggests that outside of the Northeast and California, political correctness has taken on a new meaning. He concludes by asking, in a rather mocking tone, How do you like being politically correct now?

Here is my answer. The phrase politically correct may invite ridicule, but the intent behind it should never be a subject for mockery, particularly in our country. Simply stated, the intent is to encourage respect for the feelings of others. It means trying to avoid words and actions that imply that someone who is different in some way is therefore less valued as a human being. Put another way, it means following what Christians refer to as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. This principle has its counterpart in every major religion.

Contrary to what Mr. Denton implies, I believe the majority of Americans still value this rule, including the majority of those who voted for Mr. Trump.

In todays turbulent political environment, it is more critical than ever to hold true to this sacred principle and defend it whenever it comes under attack.

Lawrence Modisett

Portsmouth

Read the original here:

Lawrence Modisett: Need for political correctness still holds true - The Providence Journal

USA TODAY 5:03 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2017

Cub Scouts in New York's Times Square.(Photo: Mary Altaffer, AP)

The Boy Scouts of America announced Monday that, effective immediately, it will accept and register transgender youth into its organization. Facebook comments are edited for clarity and grammar:

How long before any one of the new gender types sues to change the name from Boy Scouts of America to Snowflake Scouts?

Jackson Wilson

Its called Boy Scouts of America for a reason. Just start another one called the misinformed!

Stanley Baker

First you begin to wobble, then you fall. The U.S. is on a downward trajectory. There is no good that can come from supporting this kind of recognition from the Boy Scouts.

I think it is child abuse to allow a child to pretend to play the role of the opposite sex, and it is even worse when parents and school officials support and encourage it.

A child living under my roof will follow my rules, until he is of legal age and can live on his own. Thats the way it has always been. That is what a normal parent would do. But we live in a very sick society today. Parents do not want to parent, they want to be a childs friend.

Larry Hubble

USA TODAY

Policing the USA

I agree that forcing a child to play the role of the opposite sex is bad. But transgender children have been forced to pretend to be something they are not for a very long time.

It is time for that nonsense to stop, and let trans children be who they are without having to pretend to be someone they are not.

Bryan Oakley

As an Eagle Scout, Im proud of this decision from Boy Scouts. It was long overdue.

Andy Linn

This is absolutely sickening. It seems like every parent wants his child to grow up a fruitcake.

Politically correct culture is destroying American youth and emasculating our young men. Get some guts and stand up to this liberal agenda.

Edgar Fuss

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2jSpoZR

Read more:

Boy Scouts ruined by political correctness: Your Say - USA TODAY

To the Editor:

Heres an update on an old joke I heard in the early sixties. Two politically correct people were on a dude ranch watching two horses in the corral.

One said he favored the taller horse to ride. The other asked if he thought the taller one was the one on the left or right. The first P.C. man said the taller one was on the right. The second man said he thought the black one on the left was taller than the white one on the right.

If that sounds silly, think about the white singer or actor in a Popeyes restaurant. One server asked another who was next. The second said the white boy was. In the sea of black faces it was the obvious remark to make.

Isnt it silly to make a big deal out of trying to differentiate who is next by the color of skin and not by the color of socks or height? I say political correctness has gone too far when you cant use skin color to identify a person. Thats why the news gives a detailed description of a criminal people should be looking for and leaves out skin color.

Chuck Johnson

Morris

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Continued here:

Letter: Political correctness has gone too far - The Herald-News

Being considerate of others identities does not need to conflict with discussion of issues.

Dear Griffin,

My names Isabella. I am Latinx, brown, queer, genderqueer and Im writing to you not in anger, but in concern that your piece (Political correctness silences vital discourse) in the last issue of the Collegian (1/26) is irresponsible and reflects a lot of the dangerous mental slippery slopes white people can sometimes get themselves into.

Political correctness isnt a term used by the liberals you condemn in your article. We just call it respect. But if you need an explanation as to why we ask for certain things, here it is: What you call PC culture did not rise out of collective over-sensitivity and inability to discuss issues that are difficult or contentious. What you condemn is actually just a call for respecting peoples identities and how they intersect with each other. Its a way to protect marginalized peoples from the very real dangers they face every moment of their lives.

Example: Have you ever hesitated to respond to the professor in class because racism, sexism, queerphobia or transphobia, colonialism, etc. have made you believe that you cannot take up the intellectual space that straight, cis, white people always have access to?

Have white men ever yelled the n-word at you as they celebrate Trumps victory?

Have you ever been called a spik twice in two weeks for speaking your native tongue? Once in front of dozens of students in Ascension while you were on the phone with your mother? Is your family living under a colonial dictatorship in Puerto Rico?

Have you ever been afraid of speaking your native tongue?

Have you ever had to live in a world that was not built for you? Had to plan every move because you are not able-bodied? Have you ever been laughed at, gawked at, torn apart for your disability or neurodiversity?

Have you ever had to wonder when your next meal would be? Have you ever had to give up your medication because you can no longer afford it?

Have you ever wondered if youll be able to finish your degree?

Have you been walking and feared someone attacking you for your race, for being a woman, for your gender identity, for being with your samesex partner or for wearing a hijab? Do you see your friends and family being brutalized in the news by police, white supremacists, etc., and then see the news blame your community for making people want to hurt you?

Do you have to constantly remind yourself that you dont deserve to be hurt?

Has someone ever told you that youre making up your gender? That your pronouns are wrong when they are a radical act of self-love? Of letting yourself be the person, the gender, you are?

Have you ever feared deportation? Have you ever stayed up at night wondering if the life you have built is going to be taken away from you by immigration forces that storm into your house and take you and your family away?

This is why marginalized people need PC culture. PC culture is us reminding ourselves that we matter. That were worth as much as straight, cis, white people are. That we dont deserve to be beaten down every day. So when we identify ourselves as Latinx, as queer, as trans, as brown or black, as immigrants, as Muslims, as disabled, etc., and ask other people to respect us, it is not from a place of fear. Were not afraid to talk about difficult topics. We live those difficult topics every day. When we identify ourselves, were telling the world that, in spite of it all, we love ourselves and demand the same love and respect everyone else gets everyday.

If we survive fighting everyday against a system that wants us dead, alone, mangled or converted, sick and tired and still succeed in this school, then its time we reevaluate who the fragile one is.

As a fellow Kenyon student, if I can take the time to educate myself and respect your identity, you can take the time to educate yourself about our identities. And maybe, if you learned something in the process, you would understand why were angry.

With respect,

Isabella Bird-Muoz 18

See the original post:

Political correctness exists to build respect for the oppressed - Kenyon Collegian

Washington Post

Spicer says 'political correctness' infringes on 'freedom of religion' Washington Post February 2, 2017 3:14 PM EST - White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Feb. 2 said that Americans who wish to express their religious views sometimes tend to be prevented from doing it in the name of political correctness. (Reuters) ...

Excerpt from:

Spicer says 'political correctness' infringes on 'freedom of religion' - Washington Post

February 5, 2000, Bill Lind, 283 Comments

An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind

Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University

Where does all this stuff that youve heard about this morning the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.

We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?

We call it Political Correctness. The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, its deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.

First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted victims groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges some star-chamber proceeding and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, Wait a minute. This isnt true. I can see it isnt true, the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be victims, and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isnt as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies dont get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.

And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, its Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, its deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that all history is about which groups have power over which other groups. So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that were familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.

But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.

Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments the bourgeois governments because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didnt happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.

Marxists knew by definition it couldnt be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didnt spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didnt support them.

So the Marxists had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, Who will save us from Western Civilization? He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.

Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the latest thing.

In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.

And he says, What we need is a think-tank. Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out its a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.

Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1917, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism. Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology. Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed. The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimers views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. Theyre still very much Marxist in their thinking, but theyre effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, Hey, this isnt us, and were not going to bless this.

Horkheimers initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois societys socio-economic sub-structure, and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, Im not reading from a critic here in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.

The stuff weve been hearing about this morning the radical feminism, the womens studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because youre tempted to ask, What is the theory? The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it cant be done, that we cant imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as were living under repression the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression we cant even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and thats the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of polymorphous perversity, that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromms view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of essential sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined. Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature. That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. The theme of mans domination of nature, according to Jay, was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years. Horkheimers antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (heres were theyre obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness. In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture. And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his protestagainst asceticism in the name of a higher morality.

How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.

These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldnt just get out there and say, Hell no we wont go, they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there when the student rebels come into Adornos classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.

One of Marcuses books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of polymorphous perversity, in which you can do you own thing. And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! Theyre students, theyre baby-boomers, and theyve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesnt require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, Do your own thing, If it feels good do it, and You never have to go to work. By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, Make love, not war. Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines liberating tolerance as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.

In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In hate crimes we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. Its exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now its coming here. And we dont recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that its not funny, its here, its growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.

See more here:

The Origins of Political Correctness - academia.org

Geert Wilders convicted of inciting discrimination

DUTCH anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders was found guilty Friday of insulting and inciting discrimination against Moroccans, a conviction he immediately slammed as a shameful attack on free speech and an attempt to neutralise him.

Presiding Judge Hendrik Steenhuis said the court would not impose a sentence because the conviction was punishment enough for a democratically elected politician.

Wilders was not in court for the verdict that came just over three months before national elections. His Party for Freedom is narrowly leading a nationwide poll of polls and has risen in popularity during the trial.

Wilders quickly released a video message, in English and Dutch, slamming the judgment and vowing to appeal.

Today, I was convicted in a political trial which, shortly before the elections, attempts to neutralise the leader of the largest and most popular opposition party, Wilders said. They will not succeed.

The politically charged prosecution centred on comments Wilders made before and after the Dutch municipal elections in 2014. At one meeting in a Hague cafe, he asked supporters whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. That sparked a chant of Fewer! Fewer! Fewer! to which he replied, well take care of it.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte, speaking after the verdict, underscored that he and his Liberal Party would not consider forming a coalition with the Party for Freedom unless Wilders retracts the comments. That is our stance and it remains our stance, Rutte said at his weekly press conference.

Prosecutors say that Wilders, who in 2011 was acquitted at another hate speech trial for his outspoken criticism of Islam, overstepped the limits of free speech by specifically targeting Moroccans.

He had insisted he was performing his duty as a political leader by pointing out a problem in society.

On Friday, he was convicted for the interaction with the crowd of supporters in the Hague cafe, which judges said was carefully orchestrated and broadcast on national television. He was acquitted for similar comments he made in a radio interview a week earlier, which the judges said did not amount to inciting hatred.

Steenhuis stressed that freedom of expression was not on trial. Freedom of speech is one of the foundations of our democratic society, the judge said. But he added: Freedom of speech can be limited, for example to protect the rights and freedoms of others, and that is what this case is about.

Abdou Menebhi, president of the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Migration and Development, welcomed the judgment. For us, its a very important verdict, he told The Associated Press. This gives the Moroccans who felt like victims a renewed belief in a democratic society.

He said it also sent a message to Wilders supporters. This man is not looking for solutions for you, Menebhi said. His is an ideology of smearing Europe, migrants, Muslims, without offering alternatives.

SOURCE

When did brown sauce and Union Jack knickers become racist?

The owner of a novelty gift shop called Really British says he has been smeared as a RAY-CIST! by a bunch of bigoted, brain-dead Guardianistas. Chris Ostwald claims to be the target of an online campaign aimed at forcing him to change the shops name.

Hes accused of being pro-Brexit, as if thats on a par with paedophilia, and has been hit with a boycott.

The store only opened at the end of November, but Chris has already lost one member of staff who resigned after her first day because she was fed up with the abuse. And shes Spanish.

People have been walking in to the shop, on Muswell Hill Broadway, in North London, simply to complain about its alleged racism. Hes been warned that the place will be picketed to deter potential customers.

From the furious reaction on anti-social media, youd think Chris was selling National Front T-shirts, BNP baseball caps and signs reading No blacks, no dogs, no Irish.

All hes doing is flogging quintessentially British nick-nacks and souvenirs, such as brown sauce, London Underground tea-towels, Union Jack knickers, Prince Charless favourite socks and models of the Queen.

Mind you, the mere sight of our national flag is enough to give these Left-wing mentalists an attack of the screaming ab-dabs. Chris says he was forced to take down two Union flags for fear of reprisals. How long before some self-appointed social justice warrior decides to lob a brick through the window?

A Facebook page called Muswell Hill and Friends provides a forum for this confected anti-racist rubbish. Some of the protests are hilarious.

One nutter wrote: Like many people I live in London because of its international nature, and for me having a big sign saying Really British makes me feel youre implying that other businesses in the area are therefore somehow not really British.

Some will no doubt say Im over-sensitive but I cant help thinking that given the recent divisive referendum and the current political climate you might have chosen a more inclusive name in 2016.

Nurse!

OK, so this could be a publicity stunt designed to get some free advertising for Chriss new venture. He certainly seems to be enjoying the attention. But I have no doubt the rabid reaction he describes is genuine.

We lived down the hill from the Broadway for 12 years, so Im familiar with the area. Its where the Davies brothers Ray and Dave mainstays of the Kinks, that most English and proudly working class of pop groups, grew up. Chris even sells Muswell Hillbillies mugs, after the bands 1971 album of the same name.

Muswell Hill has always had pretensions, though. Its one of the posher parts of the London Borough of Haringey, which voted 75 per cent to Remain in June.

Like its near neighbour Crouch End, its home to people who cant afford to live in super-affluent, artsy-fartsy Hampstead and Highgate. Consequently, house prices have gone through the roof. A bog-standard semi will set you back over 1 million.

These days its been colonised by Guardian-reading middle-class professionals, who can afford the mortgage payments. And they are precisely the kind of folk who find any hint of patriotism not only racist but borderline Nazi.

I just wish they were a little more inventive with their invective. Their knee-jerk inclination is to scream RAY-CIST! at anyone who offends their sensibilities. Its the all-purpose insult intended to silence those who disagree with their political agenda.

You voted Leave?

RAY-CIST!

Think immigration is too high?

RAY-CIST!

Dont believe in climate change?

Er, RAY-CIST!

The whole racism slur is so tiresome and predictable that it has become utterly meaningless.

But its not difficult to imagine them going out of their tiny Chinese minds to borrow an expression from the late Denis Healey over a shop called Really British in the heart of Remain country.

Its a daily reminder, as they trek to the health food cafe for their quinoa-infused soya wheatgrass wossnames, that they LOST.

Boo-hoo.

How on earth, otherwise, can anyone get outraged about a suburban novelty shop, six miles from the centre of our capital city, selling British bric-a-brac, memorabilia and models of the Queen and flying the Union flag? Its deranged.

In the normal course of events, I wouldnt take much notice of social media storms. But this one is directed at defaming a small businessman and destroying his livelihood unless he falls into line and changes the name of his shop.

And it is also an illustration of the post-Brexit vote pantomime in microcosm. The Remoaners dont really have any convincing reasons to stay in the sclerotic, corrupt and currently imploding European Union.

In fact, the noisy attempts to derail Brexit have almost nothing to do with the benefits or otherwise of being a member of the EU.

No, its all about them.

Ranting and raving about Leave voters being racist, ignorant and gullible scum of the earth is simply another way of reinforcing their own inflated opinion of themselves as morally superior beings. Its why Chris Ostwalds shop has been singled out for self-righteous abuse, too.

By smearing him as a RAY-CIST! these potty, po-faced protesters are burnishing their right-on credentials. They may be Muswell Hillbillies but unlike those ghastly Little Englanders who wave the Union flag and voted for Brexit they want everyone to know that first and foremost they are caring, compassionate citizens of the world.

To adapt Ray Davies, from the title track of that 1971 Kinks album:

Im a Muswell Hillbilly boy,

But my heart lies in old West Somalia.

Makes you proud to be British.

SOURCE

The Spectator: Big Parts of Rock n Roll Are Quietly Right-Wing

Writing in Britains magazine The Spectator, Rod Liddle argues that there are, and have always been, right-wing rock musicians.

Liddle makes his argument after popular rock musician Kate Bush expressed admiration for British Prime Minister Theresa May. May is the leader of Britain's Conservative Party.

Talking to Maclean's recently, Bush said, We have a female prime minister here in the UK. I actually really like her and think shes wonderful. I think its the best thing thats happened to us in a long time. Shes a very intelligent woman but I dont see much to fear. I will say it is great to have a woman in charge of the country. Shes very sensible and I think thats a good thing at this point in time.

Bush received criticism on social media for the comments. According to Liddle, there are more conservatives in rock and roll than is widely thought:

Bush comes from a prog-rock background, a rather pompous genre which was never known for its revolutionary fervour...Over the Atlantic, the Canadian prog-metal band Rush were dedicated followers of Ayn Rand. That other blue-collar blind alley of rock music, heavy metal, had plenty of conservatives here and in the United States, insofar as anyone involved cared about politics at all. Even the few metal bands considered cool by the left-wing music press were right of centre. In the 1970s Iggy Pop (James Newell Osterberg from Muskegon, Michigan) released a magnificent, howling opus called Im a Conservative. Brilliant, brilliant satire, the liberal music press agreed, clapping their hands. Until Iggy said: Uh, no, I actually am a conservative. So was Ted Nugent, and so were a whole bunch of others. Liddle also notes that Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was a Republican Tea Party supporter, and that Leonard Cohen defended Israel. He also argues that there was a pro-capitalist element to punk rock:

The independent record labels which sprang up in the wake of punk were not anti-capitalist far from it they were just anti the in-effectual and conservative capitalism which pertained among the likes of EMI and CBS. Punk was also a reaction to the sopping wet liberalism of the hippies; and the poster boy for the post-punk movement, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, was a fervent Thatcherite. Or at least he was before he killed himself. Liddle concludes: Rock music is an intrinsically conservative medium, no matter how much its proponents and champions in the music press might try to pretend otherwise.

SOURCE

10 Things We Should Learn From the Ohio State Attack

by Shireen Qudosi, a Muslim writer based in California.

Americans returned from Thanksgiving to news of the latest jihadi attack waged by a Somali Muslim, Abdul Razak Ali Artan. Declaring that he had reached a "boiling point," the 18-year-old Ohio State University student drove a car into a crowded area on the Columbus campus. He then exited the vehicle and attacked the crowd with a knife. Artan injured 11 students before being killed by a university police officer.

Artan was a legal resident who came to the US through Pakistan in 2014. He arrived with his family, securing a refugee status after having escaped from Somalia.

Ohio State University President Michael V. Drake, along with Ohio State Governor John Kasich, shied away from identifying the cause of the attack. This despite Artan's last Facebook post embracing a chilling message that in part read, "By Allah, we will not let you sleep unless you give peace to the Muslims..."

Terrorism expert Walid Phares is clear about the motive. In private correspondence, Dr. Phares shares his belief that the Ohio State attack is "Another case of urban Jihadism. At this point the issue isn't even a link or not to ISIS or al Qaeda, but a link to the specific ideology called Jihadism. This is the generator of terror."

In his book, The War of Ideas: Jihadism Against Democracy, Dr. Phares charts irreconcilable views between democracy and the violent ideology of jihadism that promotes a doctrine of death. Writing in The War of Ideas, Dr. Phares shares the insight that seems to escape academia and a former GOP presidential candidate:

"The ushq al mout (love of death) is the backbone of suicide bombing and gives terrorism its most frightening firepower. Indeed, once the fear of death is subtracted from political planning and public concern, there are no limits to the power of Jihadism"

In the case of Ohio State jihadi Abdul Artan, the question is how did a child once fleeing Somalia under the fear of death then embrace death when finally under the protection of the greatest superpower? Further, how did decades of experience as a refugee escaping persecution not deter Artan from the jihadi doctrine of death? Answering these questions requires understanding how violent ideology slips through the slightest cracks in the system.

America is dealing with a crushing rise of jihadi dark web chatter that privatizes radicalization. Indoctrination into a violent political ideology thrives through combination of secret portals and chat rooms like AMAQ on Telegram that provide safe online communities for jihadi talk. Instant radicalization paired with travel to or from red-flag nations, broken immigration vetting and tracking systems, lack of community emphasis on assimilation, and the politicization of mosques as polarizing hotspots, places individuals on a three month fast track to radicalization.

Just three months prior, Artan was featured in Humans of Ohio State' - a profile in the university's student paper - that showed Artan hyper-focused on prayer spaces and identity politics. Three months later, he's pledged allegiance to ISIS in a killing spree. We could conclude that time period of radicalization was just this brief- or we could, far more reasonably, conclude that Artan's use of the left's victimhood narratives dovetail quite comfortably with his jihadi beliefs.

That is the hard reality we're faced with. Instead, talking points have shifted to Islamophobia as a public health crisis for Muslims. And rather than recognizing the victims, mainstream media is humanizing the attacker as a social outcast who "loved America." That real problem is the killing sprees some Muslims are engaging in; it is not the mean words penciled and shoved into the mail slot at the local mosque. The inability of Muslims to recognize a present danger versus fear of a hypothetical threat, only further places all Americans at risk because it prevents us from being able to collectively move forward in dealing with radical Islam.

It also places Muslim Americans at greater risk; the more Muslims deny the causal link between Islam and jihad, deflecting attention to a self-victimizing rhetoric, the more rest of America grows frustrated. It is also worth asking whether Muslim American organizations and communities that obstruct discourse and discovery by misdirecting away from real problems should be included in a broader perimeter of public inquiry. Instead of dealing with the most recent eruption of radical Islam, the issue is swept under the rug and upon it sits the incubus we call Islamophobia.

Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Islamist groups like CAIR, who could not step away from the abacus of Muslim grievances for just one day, continued tallying letters (real or scripted) rather than looking beyond themselves to see that Muslim American communities have a much bigger problem: radicalization.

In fact, across American there were only a handful of outlets and personalities that are pressing for truth in dialogue. This includes Conservative Review's Carly Hoilman, who took to higher ground in a piece titled "Difficult Conversations: Challenging Islam in the Wake of the Ohio State Attack."

It also includes Michelle Malkin who tweeted, "Ohio State University jihad has virtually disappeared from national headlines -except for the p.c. Muslims fear backlash' stories." That pattern was also spotted by the The Foreign Desk, which noted dark web chatter was on the rise with talk hailing the attack and allegiance being shown in the form of profile pics replaced with a photo of Artan.

Being able to move forward means treating thought process behind this attack as a forensic scene that requires precision and analysis. That scene tells that that the only public health crisis an ideological virus with a three month incubation period. This means that the next attacker is set to be radicalized by Inauguration Day.

Studying that virus for actionable intelligence means observing how that strain has formed and how it influences another host. Yet, the Ohio State attack was one of the least exhaustively covered jihadist attack on American soil; due to the uncomfortable questions it raises, the media dropped the issue like a hot potato.

The implications of the attack encompassed key crisis points facing our nation and new administration, including immigration, travel to red-flagged state sponsors of terror, and questions of assimilation. Not only were these though questions glossed over, but the intelligence we could gain from them were missed opportunities, including:

1. Failing to look at the radicalization of the Somali Muslim community and its troubled history in the United States as one of the leading actors of domestic terror.

2. Waiting for ISIS to confirm the attack rather than moving proactively on the facts that jihad comes from the doctrine of war in Islam. That doctrine is not limited to ISIS. It will continue to be a problem long after ISIS is defeated - if it's defeated.

3. Failing to spot that ISIS does not claim every attack; they prefer to take credit posthumously. ISIS didn't claim three radicalized women in France who failed carry out attacks against Notre Dame, but it did claim radicalized women in Kenya. ISIS also didn't claim New Jersey attacker Ahmad Khan Rahami, though the pattern of attack mirrors ISIS.

4. Failing to see that Ohio State attacker Adul Artan self-identified with ISIS in Facebook statement that called for the message being screen-grabbed before it was deleted. This is standard direction under ISIS to individual actors so that ISIS may identify the attack as a pledge. Those directions appear on page 12 of the latest issue of Rumiyah, an ISIS propaganda magazine.

5. Failing to identify the relevance of Artan's pledge to ISIS versus Al-Shabab, a Somalia-linked terror group that, itself, in 2012 pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda. If the most popular Somali terror group is Al-Shabab, and the most popular Pakistani terror group is Al-Qaeda, what does it say that Artan would self-identify with ISIS? This is particularly noteworthy considering Artan's family fled Somalia for Pakistan in 2007 before arriving to the United States in 2014. The desired affiliation with the most popular and coveted terror group on the planet right now - rather than the group associated with national identity - tells us that ISIS has come a long way from being a JV team' and has secured global appeal.

6. Failing to understand that when ISIS claims Artan as a soldier, they're telling us that the face of war has shifted. Artan's last online statement confirms that theirs is ideological war, born in an ideology, bursting kinetically through physical attacks. Their soldiers don't wear uniforms and their war zone is the public space. Their targets are civilians.

7. The media and politicians' premature resurrection of gun control debate in a desperate attempt to politicize the attack along the lines of their preferred policy solutions. Of course, it became that a knife and vehicle were also used as weapons in the attack.

8. Ignoring the correlation between attacks in Europe and Canada with the Ohio State attack, all of which follow the 2014 instructions of then ISIS chief spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani who called for mobilized attacks using any tool available, including weaponizing vehicles.

9. Ignoring those instructions to weaponized vehicles were again detailed as a call to action this past Thanksgiving, also shared in the most recent issue of Rumiyah.

10. Trusting the public face of the Muslim community rather than engaging in investigative journalism to discover the true nature of comments shared by Artan's brother and his network of family and friends. His brother's Facebook page shows almost zero awareness of the gravity of the attack, no denouncement of Artan's actions as being against an Islam Muslims publically claim jihad has nothing to do with, and no sympathy for victims of the Ohio State attack.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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See original here:

Political Correctness Watch

CREDIT: DYLAN PETROHILOS/THINKPROGRESS

By Erica Hellerstein and Judd Legum

In 1991, New York Magazine published an influential cover story, titled Are You Politically Correct? The headline was splashed across the glossys front page in bold red and white letters, followed by a list of supposed politically correct questions:

The article opened with what appeared to be a heated exchange between students and a Harvard professor, Stephan Thernstrom, as he made his way through campus. As John Taylor, the author of the piece told it, Thernstrom was anonymously criticized by students in the Harvard Crimson for racial insensitivity in an introductory history course he taught on race relations in America. As word of the criticism spread throughout campus, Thernstrom quickly found himself embroiled in controversyand the target of an angry group of students. The first paragraph describes Thernstroms reaction in vivid detail:

Taylors opening certainly painted a dramatic picture. But there was only one problemit wasnt exactly true. In a 1991 interview with The Nation, Thernstrom himself told reporter Jon Weiner that he was appalled when he first saw the passage. Nothing like that ever happened, he quipped, describing the authors excerpt as artistic license. What eventually happened was perhaps unsurprising: Thernstrom decided not to offer the controversial course again. Although it was a voluntary decision, the professors story soon turned into a famous example of the tyranny of political correctness. The New Republic declared that the professor had been savaged for political correctness in the classroom; the New York Review of Books described his case an illustration of the attack on freedom led by minorities.

These claims ultimately proved to be greatly exaggerated. Weiner tracked down one of the students who complained about Thernstrom; she explained that their goals werent to prevent him from offering the class, but to point out inaccuracies in his lecture. To me, its a big overreaction for him to decide not to teach the course again because of that, she said. A professor of government at Harvard went a step further, concluding that there is no Thernstrom case. Instead, a few student complaints were exaggerated and translated into an attack on freedom of speech by black students. The professor called the episode a marvelous example of the skill of the neocons at taking small events and translating them into weapons against the pluralistic thrust on American campuses.

Back in the 90s, the conversation around political correctness was largely driven by anecdote that could easily be distorted to support a particular point of view. Last year, the same magazine that published Taylors 1991 story returned to the topic, this time publishing a treatise on political correctness by Jonathan Chait. The piece, Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say, describes a resurgence of the P.C. culture that flourished on college campuses in the 90s, even more ubiquitous now thanks to the rise of Twitter and social media. This new movement of political correctness, Chait argues, has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular. He describes it as: a system of left-wing ideological repression that is antithetical to liberalism itself. P.C. ideology can be seductive to some liberals who can be misled into thinking that this is liberalism, Chait told ThinkProgress. And I think we need to understand that its not.

Its a depiction thats made its way outside of coastal media commentary to rhetoric on the campaign trail. Criticism of the illiberal strain of political correctness has found an eager audience among a range of GOP presidential hopefuls, many of whom readily invoke P.C. as a leftist bogeyman. At a recent Republican Jewish Coalition Conference, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) declared that the politically correct doublespeak from this administration has gone beyond ridiculous.

Cruzs proclamations coincide with a string of recent student protests denouncing institutional racism on college campuses throughout the country. At Yale and Georgetown, students have asked that buildings named after white supremacists and slaveowners be renamed. At Claremont-McKenna College in California, the dean of students resigned after students criticized her response to complaints of racism on campus, and at the University of Missouri, the president resigned from his position after failing to respond to several racist acts against students, including an incident where a student drew a swastika with feces in a university bathroom.

There have also been recent student protests at Amherst, Brandeis, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Ithaca College, among others.

The protests have earned plaudits and harsh condemnation. The Atlantic denounced The New Intolerance of Student Activism. On Fox News, Alan Dershowitz claimed that a fog of fascism is descending quickly over many American universities It is the worst kind of hypocrisy. The National Review argued that the notion that students need a safe space is a lie. They arent weak. They dont need protection Why would they debate when theyve proven they can dictate terms? Pathetic.

Others, meanwhile, are quick to point out that these angry responses often come from people who hold more institutional power than the students they critique. Marilyn Edelstein, a professor of English at Santa Clara University who wrote about political correctness in the 90s, said shes been troubled by commentators impulse to dismiss important ideas and and perspectives as simply politically correct.

I think whats going on today is a resurgence of the same kind of fear by privileged white men that other people might have different experiences and legitimate grievances about the way theyre often treated, she explained. A lot of the commentators who are crying, oh political correctness now again are not at risk of actually losing any power. Conservatives are controlling the Congress and Senate and a lot of state houses, and yet they want to mock 18 to 22 year-olds for caring about things like their own experiences of being excluded or made to feel like less-than-welcome members of a college community.

If theres one thing these two camps can agree on, its that censorship does exist on college campuses. But according to those who track incidents of censorship most closely, its impacting students and faculty across the ideological spectrum. Acknowledging the true nature of repression on college campuses is complex and does not neatly fit the narrative of P.C.s detractors, but it shouldnt be ignored. Absent a discussion rooted in reality, we appear condemned to repeat fruitless debate of the 90s.

In The Coddling of the American Mind, a cover story published last year in The Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt examine the climate of censorship and political correctness on college campuses. Something strange is happening at Americas colleges and universities, they begin ominously. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.

Lukianoff and Haidt describe a number of incidents intended to demonstrate the surge of censorship on college campus. They distinguish the climate on campuses today from that of the 90s, arguing that the current movement is centered around emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.

The authors cite real examples of suppression on campuses, but they blame the rush to censor on students apparent aversion to uncomfortable words and ideas. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into safe spaces where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable, they conclude. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

This narrative positions censorship as the product of students who seek comfort, coddling, and refuge from challenging ideas. But John K. Wilson, an editor at The Academe Blog and author of the book The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education, says that a significant portion of the criticism aimed at students is misguided. Commentators focus on student calls for censorship often ignores the growth of the administrative class, which can have just as profound consequences on speech.

I think that where there is a lot of efforts of repression going on its coming mostly from the administration, Wilson explained. One of the changes that has come about in the structure of higher education in recent decades is you have a dramatic growth in administration. And so you have more and more people whose sort of job is to work for the administration and in many cases suppress controversial activity.

Wilsons point is backed up by the data. The New England Center for Investigative Reporting found that the number of administrative employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the past 25 years. Moreover, the expansion of the administrative class comes as colleges and universities cut full-time tenured faculty positions. According to an in-depth article by Benjamin Ginsberg in the Washington Monthly, between 1998 and 2008, private colleges increased spending on instruction by 22 percent, but hiked spending on administrative and staff support by 36 percent.

Will Creeley, the vice president of legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), explained that the growth of college administration has resulted in the creation of new fiefdoms for administrators that previously did not exist. In order to justify their existence, those administrators will occasionally make themselves known by investigating and punishing speech that at public universities is protected by the first amendment or at private universities should be protected by the promises that the university makes about free speech.

As the campus administration expands, there is no doubt that some conservative-leaning voices on university campuses have been censored. Earlier this year, a libertarian student group at Dixie University was blocked from putting up flyers on campus that mocked President Obama, Che Guevara, and former President George W. Bush. At Saint Louis University in 2013, a group of College Republicans was barred from inviting former senator Scott Brown (R-MA) to speak at a campus event over concerns it would jeopardize the schools tax-exempt status. In 2014, the Young Americans for Liberty student group at Boise State University was charged nearly $500 in security fees for a gun-rights event featuring Dick Heller of the Supreme Court guns-rights case D.C. v. Heller.

Then there are examples of suppressed speech deemed hateful or offensive, such as the University of South Carolinas suspension of a student who used a racial slur and the suspension of a student at Texas Christian University for tweets about hoodrat criminals in Baltimore. These instances are where questions involving censorship become more nuanced. For many, the line of acceptable, or even free speech, ends where hate speech begins. The definition of silencing, after all, depends on who you ask. To some, censorship comes in the form of tearing down a xenophobic poster; to others, its the impulse to equate student activism with the desire to be coddled.

But how do you define hate speech? Free speech absolutists say censorship is never the answer to constitutionally protected hate speech, no matter how offensive it may be. There is no legal definition of hate speech that will withstand constitutional scrutiny, Creeley pointed out. The Supreme Court has been clear on this for decades. And that is because of the inherently fluid, subjective boundaries of what would or would not constitute hate speech. One persons hate speech is another persons manifesto. Any attempt to define hate speech will find itself punishing those with minority viewpoints.

Liberals can, and have, gone too far in their calls for suppressing hateful speech. But the excesses of whats been deemed political correctness are not representative of the culture writ large, nor do they signify a broad leftist conspiracy to silence any and all dissenting voices. The reality of censorship on college campuses is more complicatedand less useful to the most vocal critics of political correctness. Left-leaning voices are censored, toothey just rarely seem to provoke the same amount of public outrage and hand-wringing.

When it comes to repression on college campuses, theres really no evidence that theres some left-wing, politically correct attack on freedom of speech, Wilson said. In fact, there are many examples of efforts to repress left-wing speakers and left-wing faculty. Most of the attacks on academic freedom, he explained, especially the effective attacks, come from the right.

You dont have to look far to find examples. Just last week, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois was fired for claiming that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Last month, George Washington University barred a student from hanging a Palestinian flag outside his bedroom window. In November, the Huffington Post reported that Missouri state Sen. Kurt Schaefer (R-Columbia) attempted to block a graduate student at the University of Missouri from performing research on the impact of abortion restrictions. At the University of South Carolina in 2014, a performance called How to Become a Lesbian in 10 Days was canceled after state legislators expressed concern that it would promote perversion. A professor at the University of Kansas was suspended in 2013 for anti-NRA comments. At the University of Arizona, a professor was fired for conducting research on the effects of marijuana for veterans with PTSD. In 2015, a vegan rights activist at California State Polytechnic University was prevented from handing out flyers about animal abuse on campus. In 2014, campus police blocked students at the University of Toledo from peacefully protesting a lecture by Karl Rove. The same year, adjunct faculty members at St. Charles Community College in St. Louis attempting to unionize were prohibited from gathering petition signatures.

Still, these cases havent really become widely cited or popular talking points. Wilson says thats because conservatives have been more effective at advancing their narrative. The left isnt really organized to tell the stories of oppression on campus and to try to defend students and faculty who face these kind of attacks, he explained. They need the institutional structure out there, organizations that are going to talk about the issues that will counter this media narrative of political correctness thats been around for 25 years now.

Hundreds of years before political correctness made its debut in thinkpieces or the fiery rhetoric of presidential candidates, it appeared in an opinion written by Justice James Wilson in the 1793 Supreme Court case, Chisholm v. Virginia, which upheld the rights of people to sue states. Arguing that people, rather than states, hold the most authority in the country, Wilson claimed that a toast given to the United States was not politically correct. The Justice used the term literally in this context; he felt it was more accurate to use People of the United States.

The Chisholm decision was ultimately overturned and Justice Wilsons phrase slipped into obscurity. Its hard to pinpoint exactly when the expression made a comeback, but, as John K. Wilson outlines in his book, The Myth of Political Correctness, it was mainly used jokingly among liberals in the twentieth century to criticize the excesses and dogma of their own belief system. Professor Roger Geiger wrote that it was a sarcastic reference to adherence to the party line by American communists in the 1930s. Conservatives began to subvert that framing in the 1980s and use it for their own political gain, eventually transforming the term politically correct to political correctness. The latter phrase was used to describe not just a few radical individuals, as politically correct was, but an entire conspiracy of leftists infiltrating the higher education system.

This narrative gained mainstream visibility in the 1990s, but it hadnt come out of the blue. Fears about the radicalization of American universities had been brewing for years. The attacks on colleges and universities that propelled it had been organizing for more than a decade, Wilson wrote. For the conservatives, the 1960s were a frightening period on American campuses; students occupied buildings, faculty mixed radical politics into their classes, administrators acquiesced to their standards, and academic standards fell by the wayside. Conservatives convinced themselves that the 1960s had never ended and that academia was being corrupted by a new generation of tenured radicals.

These concerns eventually found a home in the conservative commentary of the 1980s, of which Wilson provides several examples: A 1983 article in Conservative Digest claiming a Marxist network doling out the heaviest dose of Marxist and leftist propaganda to students had over 13,000 faculty members, a Marxist press that is selling record numbers of radical textbooks and supplementary materials, and a system of helping other Marxist professors receive tenure; philosopher Sidney Hooks proclamation in 1987 that there is less freedom of speech on American campuses today, measured by the tolerance of dissenting views on controversial political issues, than at any other recent period in peacetime in American history; and Secretary of Education William Bennetts assertion in 1988 that some places on campus are becoming increasingly insular and in certain instances even repressive of the spirit of the free marketplace of ideas.

The media soon latched onto this narrative. Many of the articles published were almost uniformly critical of the Left and accepted the conservatives attacks without questioning their accuracy or motives, Wilson wrote. By using a few anecdotes about a few elite universities, conservatives created political correctness in the eyes of the media, and in herdlike fashion journalists raced to condemn the politically correct mob they had discovered in American universities.

Fast-forward 25 years and not much has changed. Back in the 90s, the P.C. buzzwords were speech codes and multiculturalism; now, theyre trigger warnings and microaggressions. Whether or not you agree with microaggressions and trigger warnings, they dont constitute an existential threat to free speech. Just because a person finds them frivolous or unnecessary doesnt mean theyre censorious.

The term microaggression, for example, is often used to highlight subtle biases and prejudices. The point is to open up a dialogue, not to censor students. Nevertheless, microaggressions and trigger warnings are often used as examples of campus illiberalism. Chait wrote that these newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first P.C. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.

But is there any evidence that the P.C. movement on campuses has gotten worse, or even exists at all? We asked Chait how and why he determined that political correctness, once again, was an issue worthy of exploration. He didnt offer any concrete examples. The idea for the story came from my editors, who noticed it, he replied. When I started to research the issue thats when I started to see something happening on campus that at the time wasnt getting that much attention. Now, in the months since, people are starting to pay attention. But I think its happening much more often.

Wilson offered a different take. I dont think theres really a crisis of any kind like this. Things are not that much different than they have been in the past. You have professors who get fired for expressing controversial views on Twitter, you dont have professors getting fired for microaggressions or for failing to give a trigger warning, he said, referring to the Steven Salaita casea professor at the University of Illinois who lost a promised tenured position over tweets that were critical of Israels invasion of Gaza in 2014.

Creeley did say that FIRE has seen an increase in case submissions, but he noted that isnt necessarily an accurate gauge of how much censorship is occurring on campus. He did point out that calls for speech limitations appear to be coming increasingly from students, a trend he described as new and worrying. He added that there seem to be a worrying number of instances where students are asking the authorities to sanction or punish speech that they disagree with, or to implement some kind of training on folks to change viewpoints they disagree with.

But if people who criticize these efforts are genuinely concerned about censorship, they should also worry when it comes from other sides of the political aislenot just when it neatly fits into a caricature of campus liberalism run amok. Creeley said that FIRE was disappointed to find that the case of Hayden Barnes, an environmentalist who was expelled from college for posting a collage against a proposed parking garage online, didnt take off in the media the way that other explicitly partisan cases did. It did not capture the sense of where those kinds of efforts to censor those types of students came from, he said. Its disappointing to me to see free speech be cast in partisan terms because I think that it turns the issue into a much more binary, much less nuanced, and much less thoughtful discussion.

The Missouri state senators proposal to block a students dissertation on the impact of abortion restrictions, for example, would appear to be just the kind of case that raises the ire of free speech proponents. But it doesnt appear to have gained much attention beyond coverage from a few predictably left-leaning sites. Furthermore, neither Chaits nor Haidt and Lukianoffs pieces mention the Salaita case, despite evidence suggesting punitive measures, including administrative sanctions and censorship, have been taken against Palestinian rights activists. A recent report from Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights detailed more than 150 incidents of censorship and suppression of Palestinian advocacy in 2014 alone; 89 percent of which targeted students and facultycausing speculation about a Palestine exception to the free speech debate.

ThinkProgress asked Chait about how censorship driven from the right fits into his analysis of political correctness as the province of progressives. I think thats a separate issue than the phenomenon Im describing, he answered. If you look at my original piece, very few of the examples are formal censorship. I think youve got something much deeper which is a bigger problem for people on the left, which is a broken way of arising at truth on race and gender issues. That can happen and does happen in non-censorship ways.

It doesnt take a thorough examination of the medias framing of political correctness to realize that the conversation is fraught and prone to exaggeration. Thats partially due to a lack of research on the topic. Because theres not much data available, anecdotes are often elevated as evidence; people choose the sides that best confirm their preexisting political biases and worldviews. So how does political correctness actually impact creativity? A team of researchers decided to put this question to the test with hundreds of college students.

The researchers randomly divided students in groups of three and asked them to brainstorm ideas for new businesses that could go into a vacant restaurant space on campus. Groups were either all men, all women, or mixed. The control was allowed to start brainstorming ideas immediately, but the test group was asked to take ten minutes to think of examples of political correctness on the college campus. Cornells Jack Goncalo, one of the studys researchers, told ThinkProgress that the primer was their way of making P.C. salient to students in the test group. The control group wasnt asked to talk about P.C., so it wasnt on their minds.

Researchers wanted to challenge the assumption that an anarchy approach to creativity is sort of the only way to go or even the best way to go, Goncalo said. Our argument was that although P.C. is dismissed as being overly controlling and sort of the conservative view is that P.C. is a threat to free speech, we actually predicted that P.C. would provide a framework that would help people understand what the expectations are in a mixed-sex group and would reduce uncertainty. And by reducing uncertainty it would actually make people more comfortable to share a wide range of ideas.

Indeed, the researchers found that the mixed-sex groups instructed to think about political correctness generated more ideas and were more creative than the diverse groups that hadnt received the P.C. primer. But that didnt hold true for the same-sex groups. Groups of all men or all women that were told to think about political correctness ended up being less creative than the control group.

Goncalo said those results suggested that talking about political correctness actually reduced uncertainty among mixed-sex groups, making it easier for men and women to speak up and share their ideas. For diverse groups, P.C. can be a creativity booster.

Until the uncertainty caused by demographic differences can be overcome within diverse groups, the effort to be P.C. can be justified not merely on moral grounds, but also by the practical and potentially profitable consequences of facilitating the exchange of creative ideas, the study concludes.

Unfortunately, there arent many scientific papers on the topic of political correctness. The researchers study appears to be the only one that looks specifically at political correctness, creativity, and group activity. And even then, it wasnt easy to get their research published.

It was an uphill battle, Goncalo said. A lot of academics see the whole term political correctness as a colloquial non-scientific, non-academic thing. We had to push really hard to say this is a legitimate thing. It took the team nine years to publish the reportand when it eventually came out, there was push-back. I got emails from angry people who were really pissed off and actually hadnt read the paper or understood what we did or what found, Goncalo remarked. Just knee-jerk reactions to the whole thing. So it was polarizing as you might expect.

To be sure, their paper is just one study on a topic with limited scientific research. But its conclusions shouldnt be ignored; it raises worthwhile points about the impact of speech constraints and communication among diverse groups. After all, the ongoing conversation about P.C. often relies on anecdotal evidence rather than data. This is part of the reason its subject to such vigorous debatepeople like to tailor the evidence to their worldview, not vice versa.

Goncalo also came to an interesting conclusion about the value assigned to political correctness throughout the course of the study, which took nine years to publish. Were exactly where we were in the 80s and 90s, he noted. And I think what that says is that the word is still meaningful and people are still using it in the same way.

For all of the commentary about campus activism and political correctness, theres one group we rarely hear from: actual college students. ThinkProgress visited students at American University to learn about their impressions of the political correctness conversation taking place. Although the responses were from just a sampling of college students, they were telling.

Students at American University overwhelmingly told ThinkProgress they didnt find political correctness to be a pressing campus problem. Only one student we spoke to equated P.C. with censorship, while the rest of the students we spoke with seemed more concerned about hate speech and racist comments posted in online forums. The students quoted below preferred to be identified by their first names.

Azza, a senior at American University, said that much of the commentary aimed at critiquing political correctness fails to understand the experience of being a minority student on campus. Students of minority backgrounds deal with certain issues, they face certain issues, there are things that affect them differently, and when you enter a learning environment that is hostile towards you, you cant learn, she explained. People who are saying that this is suppressing free speech or that people want to be coddled are actually not at all concerned about free speech. The vast majority of people are concerned with a particular type of discourse being fostered on American universities that reflects their particular understanding of American life and society and values.

Azza used the suppression of Palestinian activism on campuses as an example: No one in these groups who are so supposedly concerned with free speech has said anything about that, because they dont actually care about free speech, she remarked. If they did, theyd be speaking on behalf of Palestinian students. What they care about is just not letting minority voices dominate the discourse by trying to get university administrators to create an environment thats safer.

Mackenzie, a senior at AU who was sitting near Azza in a student cafe, added: Just because [the conversation] is different from when [critics] were in college doesnt mean its wrong and that were being babied. We dont want to be babied, its not that. Were fighting for something that is right.

Other students told ThinkProgress they were unsatisfied with the administrations response to offensive messages posted on Yik Yak, an online platform where students have been known to anonymously post racist content. One of the biggest things thats been going around is the racist speech on Yik Yak, and how as an anonymous platform to spread information about other people its been used to threaten and scare students and make certain students feel unsafe, another student, who did not share her name, explained. Hate speech is not free speech. Once that the language that you use infringes on another students ability to feel safe on campus and to feel that theyre allowed to come to class without feeling threatened, that isnt free speech because youre taking someone elses rights away.

Marlise, a junior at AU, said she has encountered students who abuse the system. They use the trigger warnings if they dont want to hear the other side of things, or if they dont agree with something. I think that people on the outside appear to stand in solidarity with Mizzou but theres always going to be those people that say I dont want to hear the other side. Still, she agreed that the content posted on Yik Yak is a big issue.

Students also said that criticisms of political correctness are often underpinned by racial insensitivities on campus. Jendelly, a sophomore at AU of Dominican descent, said she feels as though there is a racially divided hierarchy on campus. My dad works for the county and he works alongside the mayor, she said. And a lot of people who hold those high positions in our town are white. But theyve never made us feel like were second to them or were three-quarters of a person. Coming here, in this school, I do feel like were placed in a hierarchy. And I feel like when I see a white person its like, oh I have to step up my game to reach their level. And I shouldnt have to feel like that.

Its unclear what the multi-decade debate over political correctness has accomplished in aggregate. But there is one group of people who find it incredibly useful: Republican politicians.

The use of the term political correctness, particularly in the Republican presidential primary, does not have a specific definition. Rather it functions like a swiss army knifeit is the answer to every kind of issue that a candidate might confront. Its a get out of jail free card for bigotry, sexism and lying.

When Fox News Megyn Kelly confronted Donald Trump in an August GOP debate with a litany of sexist attacks he made against women, he had a ready answer. I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. Ive been challenged by so many people, and I dont frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesnt have time either, Trump said. The audience applauded.

Trump loves to rail against political correctness on Twitter. He argues that our country has become so politically correct that it has lost all sense of direction or purpose. For example, he is not able to use the word thug without criticism.

Ted Cruz goes a step further. Political correctness is killing us, he argued during a Republican debate in December. On his website, Cruz blames political correctness for 9/11.

Cruz also finds political correctness useful for collecting email addresses.

Ben Carson tweeted that we should #StoPP funding political correctness and PlannedParenthood. What does funding for Planned Parenthood have to do with political correctness? He doesnt really explain, except to say that political correctness is making us amoral.

Carson also uses political correctness to justify his opposition to Obamacare and accepting Syrian refugees.

Confronted with criticism for saying that a Muslim should not be presidenta religious test that would violate the constitutionCarson replied that political correctness is ruining our country.

Why are these candidates so quick to point out instances of political correctness? Like a lot of things politicians talk about, it polls very well. A recent poll found that 68 percent of Americans, and 81 percent of Republicans agreed that A big problem this country has is being politically correct. Even among Democrats, 62 percent agreed.

Poll numbers like these have a snowball effect. The more popular the message, the more politicians will talk about it or use it as a way to divert the conversation away from more troublesome topics. The more politicians talk about political correctness, the more Americans will believe its a big problem. Rinse and repeat.

Is Chait, a liberal who regularly blasts Republican candidates as extreme and incompetent, concerned that political correctness has been co-opted to justify the ugliest aspects of American political life? Not really.

I think its always been misused by conservatives [liberals should] ignore the way that conservatives talk about this phenomenon, completely. And lets just have a debate among people who are left of center Conservatives are trying to interject themselves into it, Chait said.

This might be what Chait prefers but, on a practical level, the far-right has captured the bulk of the conversation about political correctness. Articles by Chait, while purportedly for the left, are promoted voraciously by the right to bolster the argument about political correctness on their terms, not his.

While the exploitation of the term political correctness by Republicans is, on the surface, problematic for liberals, it also serves an important function. Many people on the left prefer to think of themselves as open-minded and not captured by a particular political party or ideology. But over the past several years, the Republican party has tacked hard right. The policies embraced by Republicansincluding a harsh crackdown on immigrants, massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the destruction of critical environmental protectionshave left little substantive common ground with liberals.

By embracing criticisms of political correctness, liberal commentators are able to do something that is somewhat ideologically unexpected, while avoiding embracing substantive policies they might find intensely destructive. Its a painless way to demonstrate intellectual independence.

Bill Maher, a self-described liberal firebrand with his own show on HBO, has touted himself as politically incorrect for years. It makes his show more appealing to a broader audience and allows him an easy way to respond to charges of racism, sexism and other controversies that have plagued his career.

Concluding his piece in New York Magazine, Chait claims that the P.C. style of politics has one serious, fatal drawback: It is exhausting. There is certainly some truth to this. But the debate about political correctness is just as exhausting: Thirty years later, weve broken no new ground.

At its core, the P.C. debate is about something meaningful. It is a discussion about how people should treat each other. The language we use to define it may change, but the conversation will keep going. Still, after more than three decades of repeating the same arguments, perhaps its time to recognize that the current iteration of this discussion has run its course.

A new debate could rely less on anecdote and more on actual data. It could be less about protecting rhetorical preferences and more about prohibiting actual censorship. It could dispense with political grandstanding and become more grounded in reality, without the apocalyptic and shallow narratives.

The end of the phony debate about political correctness will not be the end of the debate about political correctness. But it could be the beginning of something better.

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The Phony Debate About Political Correctness ThinkProgress